Every day, in high schools across the United States, a student will fall behind in a reading assignment. Some, like the protagonist of The Act of Reading, will go as far as to fail the class, only returning to the literature many years later.
Now a fully-formed adult with a Master’s degree in Film Production, the narrator seeks to redeem himself in the eyes of his high school English teacher by presenting her with the best book report presentation on Moby-Dick that has ever been assembled. The mighty and digressive novel pulls the resulting film in its multitudinous directions, ultimately confronting us with bigger questions about how reading works in society and the brain, what happens when it doesn’t work, and how reading a book may alter the course of your life.